"Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever med'cine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou own'dst yesterday." Probably the use of mandragora as a narcotic may have continued much later than the thirteenth century. In earlier times it was certainly used as opium is now used, not for medicinal purposes, but to produce for a while an agreeable sensation of dreamy drowsiness. "There were those," says Dr. Richardson, in his interesting article on Narcotics in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for July last, "who drank of it for taste or pleasure, and who were spoken of as 'mandragorites,' as we might speak of 'alcoholists' or 'chloralists.' They passed into the land of sleep and dream, and waking up in scare and alarm were the screaming mandrakes of an ancient civilization." He has himself made the "morion" of the ancients, dispensing the prescription of Dioscorides and Pliny. "The same chemist, Mr. Hanbury," he says, "who first put chloral into my hands for experiment, also procured for me the root of the true mandragora. From that root I made the morion, tested it on myself, tried its effects, and re-proved, after a lapse perhaps of four or five centuries, that it had all the properties originally ascribed to it." The "deadly nightshade" has similar properties. (In fact, morion was originally made from the _Atropa belladonna_, not from its ally the _Atropa mandragora_.) In 1851, Dr. Richardson attended two children who were poisoned for a time from eating the berries and chewing the leaves of the nightshade, which they had gathered near Richmond. They were brought home insensible, he says, "and they lay in a condition of suspended life for seven hours, the greatest care being required to detect either the respiration or the movements of the heart; they nevertheless recovered."